Natural Disaster or Crime? The Struggle between Mainstream Media and Facebook in Discursive Deletion of Responsibility from Environmental Crimes

ABSTRACT The news media attention to environmental crime varies; often, it is given to non-contested crimes with ideal victims. This bias is worsened by the fact that many environmental harms are committed by powerful offenders with influence over the mainstream media. Yet despite the ability of social media to contest mainstream truths, in-depth study has not been done in relation to environmental crime reporting by the two competing channels. This article analyses the contest between mainstream media and Facebook over discursive deletion of criminal responsibility for environmental crimes. To provide empirical evidence, pre-trial media coverage of a burst embankment dam is used as a case study. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, the study examines recontextualisation, a strategy for deleting environmental crimes by reporting them in the language of natural disasters. The approach is used to compare three leading newspapers in Kenya with the oppositional reading from Facebook comments. The findings demonstrate the ability of Facebook to act as a site for alternative voices in Kenya and indicts the newspapers for prioritising elite discourse that can obscure environmental crimes.